


Three Times Is a Habit

by battle_cat



Category: Trust (TV 2018)
Genre: Age Difference, Alcohol, Drug Use, M/M, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Semi-Public Sex, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, it's just a smorgasbord of good life choices up in here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-16
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-14 14:40:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28797021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/battle_cat/pseuds/battle_cat
Summary: Paul sees Primo again at a club in Rome.
Relationships: John Paul Getty III/Primo Nizzuto
Comments: 46
Kudos: 70





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Paul is 17 in the main timeline of this fic, and there are references to him having sex as a much younger teenager with people who are presumably adults. I have a feeling you're not here for the healthy relationship dynamics tho.

It becomes clear, very soon after Paul comes home, that no one wants to hear what happened to him. Not the real story anyway.

He tries, in the beginning, thinking that out of anyone in the world, his mom would be willing to understand. He tries and he watches her face close up and harden against the truth, watches her absolutely refuse to accept it. _He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. He couldn’t have planned something that had hurt her so much. Something that had almost killed him. It cannot be true._

That night, Martine curls up next to him in the narrow hospital bed. “We need to get our stories straight,” she whispers, her breath tickling his cheekbone, beneath the wadded bandage around where his ear used to be.

“What do you mean?”

“You can’t keep saying those things to your mom. Can’t you see she can’t handle it?”

And so the next morning, he says: “I didn’t mean that. About how I planned it.” She is looking at him, very still and very intently. So he keeps saying the thing he had practiced with Martine last night, playing with the edge of his bathrobe to avoid looking at her face.

“I had this crazy idea. Just…something I saw in a movie. You know. But I never would’ve done it. And then it happened, and it was like… It felt like…I _made_ it happen. Like I wanted it to happen, or something.”

“Oh,” she breathes out. He risks looking up at her face, and he sees a flood of relief there, and tears. “Oh, _Paul._ ” She pulls him into a hug, and he knows it worked.

He can’t quite tell if she honestly believes him. Or if she knows he’s full of shit but has decided this is the version of the story that she wants.

It’s the version of the story that everyone else wants too. His friends. His family, the parts of it that will still speak to him. The endless hordes of reporters who throng the hospital gates and climb trees to get pictures of him taking a shaky morning walk around the courtyard. (The BBC keeps calling the hospital front desk. _Rolling Stone_ wants an interview.)

They want a story where everything is neat and clean, where the players are easily sorted into innocent victims and sadistic criminals. So he lets his mother mutter _Those animals_ as she fusses with his hair, trying to cover the ragged lump of scar tissue as much as possible. He hasn’t told anyone the truth about what happened to his ear. He doesn’t know how he would begin to make them understand it. He’s not even sure _he_ understands it, out of context. Maybe it’s the kind of thing that only makes sense when you think you’re about to die.

He wants to tell her that it wasn’t like what she imagines. Not all the time, anyway. He’s not sure who, exactly, he’s so eager to defend, not when he still jolts awake with the memory of hot blood splattering his face. But he wants to be able to tell her about the man whose name he had never learned, who had told him it was his fault that Angelo was dead, but had also given him a St. Christopher medal he still wears under his shirt, and a hug of the kind you were supposed to get from your father. He wants to tell her about how Primo had held a shotgun an inch from his face, but had also given him a cigarette he had lit for himself, while they were waiting, together, for Paul’s family to disappoint them. He wants to tell her that he, Little Paul Getty, had been the one who had guessed that violence was the only thing that would make them listen, and that he’d been right.

He can’t say any of that. She wants a story where there’s an _us_ and a _them_ and the _us_ could never do something like _that._ So he doesn’t say anything at all.

Maybe that’s part of why it happens, the first time.

He sees Primo at a club in Rome.

He’s out at a club four or five nights a week these days, sometimes with friends, but just as often alone. He can’t sleep for shit, and Martine, four months pregnant, has become decidedly less interested in sloshing around the dance floor in an agreeable mix of whatever intoxicants they have access to that night.

It’s fine. She says she doesn’t mind him going out without her, and he’s good at making friends.

He sees the broad shoulders and curtain of dark hair from across the dance floor, in a momentary flash of disco lights. _It’s just someone who looks like him,_ he thinks at first. That’s happened before, thinking he caught a glimpse of Primo somewhere he could not possibly be, like a produce market in Riomaggiore or smoking on the terrace at a writer friend’s boring party. He’s already drunk enough that reality is sliding around pleasantly, and a little bit high from whatever he snorted off that girl’s wrist in the bathroom, and the club is dark. It’s not really him.

But then the man who isn’t Primo, just someone who looks like him, raises his head from where he was busy snorting a line of coke off the polished surface of the table in front of him, and _oh shit,_ it _is_ Primo. Primo, who catches his gaze instantly, as if he can tell when someone’s watching him. It’s like opening the door to your home and finding a tiger sitting in the front hallway.

He’s vaguely aware that he’s frozen, the rest of the dance floor bouncing and whirling around him. Primo just watches him, from where he’s draped into the corner of a leather couch on the other side of the club, and when Paul doesn’t look away, he winks.

He should leave. He isn’t sure why he’s not leaving.

Primo is still watching him with predatory stillness from across the room, as if he’s waiting to see what Paul is going to do.

What he’s going to do, apparently, is stumble his way across the dance floor to where Primo is sitting. He doesn’t realize it’s happening until he’s halfway there.

Primo doesn’t say anything as he approaches, lounging with one elbow hooked over the arm of the couch and the other arm slung along the back, not moving but still taking up more space than one person should be able to.

“Hi,” he says, stupidly. His body is going through something real weird. He knows he’s supposed to be scared, and some part of him _is_ scared; he can feel the sharp edges of it underneath the soothing blanket of alcohol. But there’s also something like the feeling of seeing an old friend across the room at a party full of strangers. It’s not that he’s _glad_ to see Primo. That would be absurd. But…he’s familiar.

He sits down, on the corner of the couch furthest away from Primo, one foot up on the seat and his knee tucked against his chest. Primo raises his eyebrows but doesn’t make any move to stop him.

Primo must know, by now, that he hadn’t said anything to the police, or to the man from the FBI who’d worked very hard at convincing Paul he could keep him safe. No, he’d said, he was terribly sorry, but he couldn’t identify anyone. They’d worn masks every time they were around him and he never saw their faces. (If he was making up lies about what happened, why not add that convenient fiction?) No, he didn’t want to look through the big binder of photos the man from the FBI had brought. If Primo’s picture was in there, he didn’t want to know.

Primo must know these things, or Paul would already be dead. So if they are not supposed to know each other, then they are just two people in a club, right? Just two people, sharing a moment, and maybe a bit of that coke Primo had been snorting.

“How are you?” comes out of his mouth, and then he immediately thinks _I’m a fucking idiot._

Primo gives him a twitch of a smile. _“Ricco.”_ He raises his tumbler of whisky in a lazy toast. He watches Paul over the rim of his glass as he drinks, and then he leans forward, elbows balanced on his thighs. Paul almost manages not to flinch.

“How are _you?_ ” Primo repeats in his loping English. He says it like he’s taking in all the things Paul has stopped caring about hiding: the dark circles under his eyes and his blown-out pupils and the weight he’s lost again, not as much as when he came out of a cave in Calabria, but enough that people are starting to notice.

The truth is, he’s shitty. He’d thought he would have a new appreciation for life, or something, after nearly dying so many times. But instead he is lethargic one day and irritable the next, incapable of focusing on any of the art he keeps saying he wants time to work on, terrible at sleeping and snappish to everyone around him. He has started getting drunk nearly every day. It doesn’t improve things much, but not being drunk is unbearable. And because Martine has stopped getting drunk and high altogether, she is sober enough to notice just how often Paul is not. They fight about it, the way they fight about all kinds of things these days.

He’d thought things with his mother would get better, now that Lang isn’t around. But somehow they’ve gotten worse, an unnamable, unspeakable, unbridgeable chasm opening up between them since the kidnapping.

The worst part is that everyone around him says they just want him to be _happy_. They say it over and over again. It makes him feel insane.

He _should_ be happy. He’s alive, very nearly whole, about to be a husband and a father. And half the time he wants nothing more than to run away from it all and never look back.

“I dunno, man,” he says, dragging a hand over his face. “I dunno.” It’s nice, not having to say he’s fine.

Primo holds up a little baggie of coke, sparkling white in the angular beam of light hitting the table, and says something in his rapid-fire Calabrian. Paul can’t understand it as well as he could after five months in captivity (he remembers realizing, with a jolt of terror, that they were talking about killing him) but _You want to feel good?_ he can still piece together after a second’s delay.

“Yeah.” That’s exactly what he wants. “I’d like that.”

Primo taps out a line onto the table. He does it right in front of where he’s sitting, so Paul has to move closer if he wants it. Right. Of course he does. This is the game: holding a cigarette just out of reach, daring him to come a little closer, when he hasn’t promised that he won’t hurt him. It’s scary, but there’s a thrill to it too, like stepping out on a narrow ledge with no guardrail.

He’s not sure what, exactly, he’s trying to prove, and to whom, but he scoots right next to Primo on the couch. He practically has to lean into his lap to reach the coke on the table, and when he tilts his head back and finishes wiping his nose he realizes his knee is resting against Primo’s.

“It’s good?” Primo is saying.

“Yeah, yeah. _Grazie._ ” He’s still distracted by their single point of contact. He’s never touched a live wire, but this is probably what it feels like. Intense and not exactly pleasant and something he should pull away from, but can’t.

Primo dangles the bag of coke between his fingers. “Getty money,” he says. The family name has a lilt in Primo’s mouth that it doesn’t among English speakers.

“Shit.” A snort of a laugh escapes him. “My granddad would fucking hate that.” It suddenly seems incredibly funny. He laughs about it for longer than it probably deserves, and when he looks up Primo has a little smile on his face, not the scary dead-eyed one he uses sometimes, but one that looks like they’re in on some secret plan together.

Time gets a little slippery, after that. There’s more coke, and cigarette smoke curling into mesmerizing shapes in the beam of light over the table, and at some point there’s a glass in his hand and Primo pouring whisky into it. It’s not so much that he’s stopped being afraid. He just keeps forgetting. He’ll get lost in trying to figure out if Primo’s eyes are blue or green or grey, and then the thought _I’m getting wasted in a club with my kidnapper_ will cross his mind and everything will lurch to a stop. And then Primo will pour him another drink and he’ll start thinking about how he wants to remember the shape of his hands, so he can draw them later, and he’ll forget all over again. 

Gradually it filters into his brain that Primo is also incredibly high, much further gone that he’d ever seen him in Calabria. He wonders what Primo is doing here, if he came here on business, or if he goes to clubs for the same reasons Paul does, trying to feel something, or trying to feel nothing; who can tell the difference anymore?

He’s dimly aware that he’s talking a lot, probably too much; he gets like that with coke sometimes. He’s ended up sitting on the couch with his legs drawn up, not quite close enough that Primo could put his arm around him if he wanted, but almost. Sometimes Primo will say something in English; sometimes in Italian, which mostly escapes his understanding in the club background noise. He can’t tell how much Primo understands what he’s saying, but Primo is letting him talk and _watching_ him, and he’s _noticing_ the way Primo is watching him, and the air between them feels charged, the way it had that one night making shadow puppets in an abandoned house in the mountains, that narrow sliver of a moment when it had seemed like, maybe, they recognized something in each other.

“Oi.” Primo is offering him another bump of coke, but from his finger this time, holding it just out of reach once again. He leans forward, but the room is swaying around him, and he’s having trouble keeping his head in one spot.

Then Primo’s other hand is on his chin, holding him steady. It sends a surge of adrenaline through him. He has to duck his head a little to snort the coke, and when he looks up he’s looking right into Primo’s eyes.

They’re green. This close, they are definitely green.

Primo is watching him, waiting to see if he’ll pull back. They’re still playing the same game. _Come a little closer._

When he doesn’t move, Primo tilts his head to the side and puts a hand in his hair, sweeping it back from the gnarled stump where he used to have an ear.

He doesn’t love people looking at his ear, usually. (Everyone wants to. Even when they’re too polite to ask, he can see them trying to catch a glimpse.) But, well…Primo was there for the bloody aftermath of the actual event. And he’s not about to gasp and turn away with his face full of horror, or pity. So he finds he doesn’t mind.

“Not bad,” Primo declares in English. He’s got that little smile on his face again, like they’re the only two people in the world who are in on a very clever joke, and maybe Paul smiles too, a little. Maybe he can’t help it. 

Primo’s fingers are still hooked under his chin, and when he doesn’t pull away, Primo runs a rough thumb over his bottom lip. 

It feels fated, like it should have been obvious the evening was sliding toward this all along. It floods him with a rush of…something; fear or arousal, he honestly can’t tell; maybe there isn’t a difference where Primo is concerned.

Primo says _andiamo,_ probably, his accent folding the word into a syllable and a half, and then Paul is following him into the shadowy back of the club, floating through a haze of booze and cocaine, processing everything a second or two after it’s already happening.

This club has a back room, of the kind where men go to hook up with other men. He can’t remember if he knew that about this place already, but Primo certainly does. The burly guy at the door lets him in without question, and Paul after him. He follows him to a dark corner, where Primo crowds him up against the wall and kisses him.

He’s kissed men before, and he’s kissed people twice his age and then some, and he’s kissed plenty of people he probably shouldn’t (more than once, because they were also fucking his dad), and none of it was like this. It’s so intense he is dizzy with it, nerves singing with something that can’t be replicated by any drug. Every touch feels an inch away from violence—Primo’s hand on his jaw could slide down and wrap around his throat; his fingers in his hair could be ready to drag his head back for a killing blow—and it adds a sharp-edged thrill that someone less fucked up than him probably wouldn’t find quite so intoxicating. They’re pressed body to body and Paul can feel that Primo has a gun tucked in his waistband, under his jacket, and it makes his stomach clench, but he can also feel that he’s hard, and that makes him want to arch up against him. Primo kisses like he’s _ravenous_ for him, and that makes him ravenous in turn; nothing ever turns him on more than knowing someone wants him.

He lets Primo devour his mouth for a while, thankful for the wall to hold him up; lets Primo’s hands roam wherever they want, tangling in his hair and stroking down his sides, digging into the flesh of his hips and ass, sliding under his shirt at the small of his back with a suddenness that makes him shudder. He’s not really sure how he is allowed to touch in return, but Primo doesn’t seem to mind the way his fingers keep digging into his back under his jacket.

When Primo puts a hand between his legs he bucks up into it before he can stop himself, and Primo makes a small satisfied noise against his mouth. Somewhere in the haze of lust his pants get opened, enough for Primo to get a hand in, and then he’s stroking him off while he ruts hard against the ridge of Paul’s hip, and he can’t do anything but hang on, pinned between the wall and Primo’s weight, while Primo works him over with steady, demanding strokes.

They both end up coming in their pants: Paul with his moan buried in Primo’s shoulder; Primo with a breathless grunt barely louder that the hot breath he’s been panting against Paul’s neck the whole time. Paul hadn’t even touched him.

( _I would have,_ he thinks, and for a wild second the thought _next time_ occurs to him. As if there is going to be a next time.)

Primo is wiping his hand clean on the bottom of Paul’s t-shirt, because of course he has to be a bit of a bastard about it. He’s still breathing hard, his hair and the low light hiding most of his face.

They’re the same height. He hadn’t registered that before now. Primo had always seemed to loom.

He wants to kiss him again. He wants to be touched, and held, and have the aching loneliness wrung out of him against the wall a little longer. But when he leans in toward Primo he pulls away.

He looks at Paul suspiciously. There’s a sniff, a cold glance of appraisal, a tug of his jacket back into place, and then he says, _“What are you still doing here?”_

Paul understands him perfectly well that time.


	2. Chapter 2

He wakes up the next morning, and he feels _good,_ and he enjoys a blissful handful of seconds before he remembers why.

 _What the fuck?_ he thinks. _What in the everloving fuck was that?_

(The feeling of Primo’s weight trapping him against the wall, the smell and the taste of him, whisky and masculine sweat and a bitter hint of cocaine in his mouth, the fever-dream thrill of Primo’s long fingers wrapping around his cock—)

Jesus fuck, what is wrong with him? He scrubs a hand across his face and tries to ignore the heat a single vivid shard of memory had sent through his body.

Martine is sleeping soundly next to him, Botticelli-plush and perfect in the morning light, the subtle swell of her pregnant belly turned toward him. They’re both naked, his clothes tossed in a heap on the floor by the bed, although he has no memory of taking them off. They’re not touching, Paul lying where he’d collapsed into bed a hand’s width away from Martine’s soft form, and he keeps it that way. As if something of Primo still lingers on him, even though the only evidence of last night’s adventure is a small smear of dried come on his lower belly.

(Bits of last night keep presenting themselves, his thoughts spinning off into obscene places before he can stop them: the barely-there sound Primo had made when he came; wondering what his face would look like, if he would let Paul see; if he would let Paul touch him, undress him, put his hands in his hair; the sheer _rush_ at the thought that he might be allowed—)

He and Martine have never been bothered, much, by either of them sleeping with other people. Or at least, Martine has never seemed bothered and Paul has done his best to pretend, because it doesn’t really seem fair to her, does it? Wanting to hoard her love and attention when he’s constantly throwing his at anyone who will give him a second glance. There’s been no talk of things changing now that they’re about to get married.

This seems to be in a slightly different category than getting it on with a mutual acquaintance at a party, though.

(Primo had _wanted_ him. The hot grubby little thrill of it sneaks up on him before he can ward it off. Primo had been the one to step over the line; he had led the way and Paul had only followed. And Primo had gotten hard, grinding against him in the dark; he had gotten off on it, and seemed to enjoy getting Paul off too. _Fuck._ Nothing compromises him faster than that, someone saying _Yes, you are wanted. I can’t get enough of you._ He never has been able to resist, when someone turns their full attention to him.)

He’d been drunk, he tells himself. Drunk and lonely, the way he feels lonely all the time these days, even in a room full of people, like he’s just slightly out of phase with everyone around him. A ghost in his own life, play-acting a version of the person he used to be. Faking his way through parties and experimental art projects and drug-fueled hijinks, even though it feels like there’s a veil between him and the rest of the world. Getting married because it’s something to do, because it will make Martine happy, because it will make his mom happy. They deserve to be happy, right? After what he put them through. Maybe it will even make him happy too; who knows? Careening into being a father when he feels like he barely knows how to be a person anymore, an actual person existing in his life right now, instead of the shadow of someone who isn’t there anymore.

And yet… It hadn’t felt like that with Primo, had it? It had felt _real._ He can’t escape the realization that last night, with Primo’s tongue in his mouth and his hand between his legs, had been the most present he had felt in months. And he has no idea, no idea at all, what to do with that.

He goes back to the same club that night, doing his best not to think too deeply about it. Primo isn’t there. He goes back every night for a week. He traipses around Rome’s fecund nightlife, pinging from one club to the next. Trying to remember in which one it was that he had made out with a sweet curly-haired Italian boy and the Italian boy’s buxom Swiss girlfriend in the middle of a whirling dance floor and it had seemed like no one had cared. Trying to decode from the booze and the drugs and the clientele whether this club or that one or that one is the kind of place Primo might frequent. It’s useless. Primo is nowhere to be found. Maybe he’s not even in Rome anymore. Nearly a month passes, and he’s starting to think maybe he hallucinated the whole thing, or dreamed it.

And then, five days before his wedding, he’s stumbling around in a haze of champagne and barbiturates, and he sees him again.

He’s going into a club, another one, swaying his way through the scrum of people at the door (he always gets let in, even if he doesn’t have money; his face and his name are currency enough), and suddenly someone has a vice grip on his arm and is pulling him away from the crowd. He sort of knows who it is even before he looks up. There’s only one person in his life with hands like that.

He’s wasted enough that he grins and says, “It’s you,” even though some part of his brain is registering that the look on Primo’s face promises violence.

 _So this is it,_ he thinks vaguely as Primo drags him into an alley. _I’m about to get shot._ He should probably be more worried about it.

Primo’s car is parked in the alley. Maybe he’ll make him get in the trunk again, drive him someplace isolated outside the city. Or kill him here in the alley and dump his body somewhere. He can’t summon anything other than detached amusement. Of course it would happen this way. At least he’ll go out feeling good.

Primo shoves him up against the car, a fist in his hair hard enough to hurt. He should be scared right now, he really should be, but there is something about having Primo’s attention, even in anger, that hits his nervous system like a drug he’d been craving without realizing it. Primo has murder in his eyes and all Paul can concentrate on is the strand of his hair that’s fallen across his face, how he wants to tuck it behind his ear.

 _“I could have had you. In Calabria. If I wanted.”_ He spits it out as if they’re in the middle of an argument about it. He’s standing very close and Paul can smell the alcohol on his breath.

He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say in response to that, so he just says, “I know.” There’s no doubt in his mind that Primo could have done whatever he wanted to him, up there in the mountains.

The next thing Primo says is a question, except Paul doesn’t quite catch the verb tense so he’s not sure if he says _Did you think about it?_ or _Do you think about it?_ And those are two different questions with two different answers.

The truth is, he hadn’t thought about it, not at the time. Not consciously, anyway. But there _had_ been something between them, hadn’t there? Some connection that shouldn’t exist but did, something that held out a tentative hand in offers of cocaine and cigarettes, in sweltering afternoons lazing around shirtless by the river, in gazes met in the rearview mirror. He hadn’t thought of what he was doing in those moments as _flirting._ But maybe he had been, just a little. Maybe he couldn’t help it. 

He’s not sure what would have happened if things had gone that way, if he would have been willing, or just too scared to protest. It feels impossible to calculate backwards from where he is now, trapped against Primo’s car in a dark alley with Primo’s face so close to his their noses are almost touching.

So no, he hadn’t thought about it then. He sure as fuck thinks about it now, though. He’s thought about it way too much since that night in the back room of the club, all kinds of fucked up fantasies spinning themselves out in his head as he jerks off in the shower, things he will never, ever, tell anyone about, ever. And he’s thinking about it right now, with Primo’s hips pinning him against the car and Primo’s hand in his hair, grabbing hard enough to make his eyes water.

So he splits the difference, and he says, “Sometimes.”

That must have been the right answer, because Primo leans in and crushes their mouths together. It starts off more biting than kissing, but Paul relaxes into it anyway, and after a moment the fist in his hair unclenches slightly. He lets his arms wrap around Primo’s neck, and Primo’s hands slide down to grip his ass. There’s a swoop in his stomach as Primo lifts him up like it’s nothing; his legs are already wrapping tight around Primo’s waist as he deposits him on the trunk of the car, pulling them closer together, closer, closer, as Primo sucks a bruise under his jaw; he’ll have a mark there tomorrow but he doesn’t care.

He probably should have seen it coming, when Primo pulls him to his feet, but it’s still a shock when he gets spun around and bent over the car, his cheek pressed against the cool metal and Primo’s hand on the back of his neck. He can’t help gasping out “Jesus fuck” at the shudder of want that goes through him, and Primo just tightens his grip on the back of his neck, as if he _knows,_ as if he’s been thinking about this one too. Paul is scrabbling to pull his pants down before Primo can even fumble at his belt; he probably couldn’t stop anything from happening at this point anyway, but he is willing, he is _definitely_ willing, and he wants Primo to know.

The first press of Primo's cock into him is immediately overwhelming, even though he can tell Primo is trying not to hurt him, which—he doesn’t have enough blood in his brain to parse out how he feels about that right now. He can feel Primo trying to go slow, at first, and it's still too much, too fast, with nothing more than a handful of spit to help things along, and it's the hottest fucking thing he's ever done in his life. He wants to say _Please don’t stop_ but all he can get out is a raw moan, but maybe Primo understands anyway, because he just holds him down and makes him take it, every thrust knocking the breath out of him, leaving him gasping “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ” while Primo echoes him in a steady stream of Calabrian curses above his head, one hand on the back of his neck and the other gripping his hip hard enough there’ll be a bruise there tomorrow. He’s really glad he’s full of drugs, because if he were sober he would want to slow down, and it’s blindingly hot and dirty and _perfect_ like this.

He can hear Primo’s breath getting rough and uneven above him, and he’s starting to think Primo intends to finish without caring whether he does or not. Which…has a certain filthy appeal to it, but at the last minute Primo reaches down and rubs at the head of his cock, and he’s so worked up that’s all it takes, he’s coming with a shout he muffles against his forearm, feeling Primo follow him over the edge a handful of breaths later, his weight collapsing against Paul’s back, just for a second.

Afterward, he tries leaning against the car to catch his breath, but his legs are shaking hard enough he doesn’t trust them to hold him up. He eases himself onto the trunk and leans back against the rear windshield, eyes closed. He’ll be sore tomorrow, but right now his body is singing with a kind of calm sweet euphoria he hasn’t felt in…ages. Not since before the kidnapping, probably. He wants to savor it.

After a minute, he feels a nudge against his shoulder. Primo is holding out a lit cigarette. He takes it and watches Primo light his own, not looking at him or saying anything, but not moving away from where he is leaning against the car an arm’s length away either.

He smokes, looking up at the narrow strip of sky visible above the alley, most of the stars muted by light pollution.

(He remember the sky outside the abandoned farmhouse in Calabria, how staggering the stars had been, the few times he’d been allowed outside late enough to see them.)

“You know, I’m getting married on Saturday,” he says after a minute. It seems sort of funny, in the distant way of a thing happening to someone else.

Primo snorts out what passes for a laugh, for him. He mutters something under his breath that Paul doesn’t catch.

He finishes his cigarette, and Primo doesn’t offer anything else, so eventually he slides off the car. There’s a moment where they’re just standing there awkwardly, neither of them sure what’s supposed to happen next.

Then Primo grinds out his cigarette and says, _“I won’t be in Rome for a while. Don’t look for me.”_ And before he can think of something to say in response, Primo gets into the car and drives off, without so much as a glance back in Paul’s direction.


	3. Chapter 3

He gets married. Things are better for a little while.

He starts talking to his mom more often, and it’s mostly okay, as long as they don’t talk about the kidnapping itself. She wants him to get plastic surgery to fix his ear. He’s not sure how he feels about it. He doesn’t like people staring, but something about just…making a new one, like it never happened, doesn’t sit right with him either.

(He thinks about Primo matter-of-factly declaring it _not bad,_ the way he hadn’t lingered on it but hadn’t flinched away either. The way his fingers hadn’t hesitated when they brushed over rough scar tissue while tangling in his hair.)

(He thinks about other things, too, things he’s not even certain he remembers. Like being half-conscious and feeling Primo’s hands on either side of his face, holding a wad of cloth over the wound that wouldn’t stop bleeding, while someone else wrapped a makeshift bandage around his head.)

He tells his mom he’ll think about the surgery.

Martine is past the morning sickness now and has decided she’s excited to be pregnant again. She’s also decided she likes sex again, and they fuck frequently, his fingers digging into her plush hips as she rocks on top of him, lying in a sweaty tangle of limbs afterward and feeling the baby kick for the first time, cry-laughing with wonder at it in a moment of post-coital bliss.

He’s just not going to think about Primo, he tells himself. So he doesn’t think about him when he jolts awake from strange dreams about Calabria—dreams that should be nightmares, dreams that sometimes _are_ nightmares, except he wakes up desperately hard. He jerks off surreptitiously in the dark, biting his fist to keep from making any noise, and he doesn’t think about Primo’s hand on the back of his neck. He definitely doesn’t think about Primo while fucking Martine on their wedding night, grinding into her on soft white sheets while his thoughts drift to the cold press of metal against his cheek and the feeling of Primo inside him, the memory still vivid enough he can taste it in the back of his throat.

He’d never done that before, let a guy fuck him, but he’d liked it. Or at least, he had liked it with Primo. He was self-assured in a way that was different from the guys Paul had messed around with at parties a few times, fumbling with hands and mouths among a mess of bodies, no one much caring whose what was where in the press of flesh and sweat. Primo had touched him like he knew exactly what he wanted and how to get it.

Something is definitely wrong with him, isn’t it? He still has nightmares about being trapped in small spaces with dead bodies. And yet he’d let Primo bend him over the same trunk he’d once locked him in next to a corpse, and he’d liked it. He’d liked it. And since then his brain has spun out an embarrassing multiplicity of fantasies: Primo tying his hands and having his way with him against the car in a field full of sunflowers; Primo making him get on his knees on the hard floor of the tunnel; Primo pushing him down and fucking him in the long grass outside the abandoned farmhouse in the mountains.

 _I could have had you, in Calabria, if I wanted._ He can’t deny that it thrills some twisted part of him, the possibility that Primo might have the same fantasies he does. That in a slightly different world from this one, some spark might have been struck between them, in one of those brief moments when things had slid out of place and they had felt like co-conspirators instead of captor and captive, when the kidnapping had seemed like something they were doing together instead of something that was being done to him. In a slightly different world, maybe they would have acknowledged that thing that lingered in the air between them sometimes, amongst the haze of cigarette smoke, the feeling that they were alike in some way, two people who didn’t quite fit into the lives they’d been born into, but maybe fit together, somehow.

It doesn’t matter now, he thinks, lying awake in the dark yet again. He lives in this world, and he is never going to see Primo again.

He draws things, sometimes. Usually late at night, when he can’t sleep. The sky outside the mouth of the cave, clouds reflecting on the still water of the goat trough. The cliffs stretching like a cathedral ceiling over the little stream where they caught fish.

Sometimes Primo is in there, little bits of him. The curl of his hand around the flame as he lights a cigarette. The line of his jaw as it had looked from the back seat of the car, the rest of his face hidden behind his shades and his hair. The one time Paul had woken up, still swimming in fever, and seen Primo’s silhouette leaning against the tunnel wall in the half-light of the storm lantern, watched him run a hand through his hair in a moment when he’d thought no one could see him.

He always burns the drawings. Touching the end of his cigarette to a corner of the paper, watching it blacken and shrivel on the balcony tile. He’s made plenty of bad decisions in his life, but even he’s not dumb enough to be caught drawing people he says he never saw.

On his eighteenth birthday, he and Martine spend the day with his mom and siblings at La Fuserna, the last of the golden autumn light clinging to the garden and the olive trees and the warm little kitchen where Gail embarrasses him with an elaborate birthday cake of the kind she used to make when he was a little kid. It’s a good day, in that fragile way that’s come to feel like the best he can expect. They don’t talk about how his birthday was spent last year. They talk about the future, about spending the winter in California, so the baby can be born there, so they can all get away from Italy for a little while. He can’t tell if he wants to get away from Italy or not. Some days he wants to get away from everywhere.

When they get back to their apartment in Rome that night, the party in his honor has already been going strong for several hours. He lets himself be swept up into it, drinking champagne out of the bottle that’s handed to him, accepting the paper crown someone has constructed out of a handful of discarded sketchbook pages, letting himself be temporarily buoyed by sangria made with creative additions from his liquor cabinet, and lines of coke done off the bare shoulderblade of whoever Marcello’s girlfriend is today, and Martine dancing in the corner with the lamplight turning her loose, gauzy dress into angelic robes, the heavy curve of her belly warm under his hand as he kisses her.

He probably should have thought about it, what the day after his birthday was the anniversary of. But the anniversary of the kidnapping had come and gone in July without him realizing it until two days later. (He’d been drunk most of the day, but no drunker than usual.) So he doesn’t think about it.

The party churns on through the night, and into the next day. Some time around noon he falls asleep sprawled sideways on his bed, fully clothed, the cigarette he had intended to light still stuck between his fingers.

In the dream he is sitting at the kitchen table at La Fuserna, the afternoon light streaming through the window. He can feel the blood sluicing down the side of his face, his neck, his chest, pooling on the table in front of him, and in his head is the familiar horror— _what have I done, what have I done_ —but he can’t move and he can’t speak. His mom is there and she puts a birthday cake down on the table, right into the blood, and her face beams above the lit candles as she says, “Make a wish, Paulie,” as if she can’t see any of it, the gaping wound he knows is there on the side of his head, the terror that must be showing on his face, the dark glossy blood spreading across the table, dripping onto his bare feet on the floor—

He jerks awake, heart pounding so hard he can feel it in the roof of his mouth. The light of a crimson sunset is streaming into the silent apartment and he has a moment of stomach-churning disorientation before he remembers where he is.

He sits up, mouth feeling like cotton, the bile of too much sugary-sweet alcohol in the back of his throat. There’s a glass of water on the cluttered nightstand that has miraculously escaped having a cigarette butt dropped into it, and whether it was placed there for him or not he gulps it down.

Martine is sleeping curled up on the corner of the bed he wasn’t sprawled across. She stirs and looks up blearily at him. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah.” He drags a hand across his face. She reaches out, to stroke his hair maybe, but he’s already standing up. “I’m gonna…go for a walk, I think. Don’t worry. I won’t be gone long.”

“Okay.” She looks like she is worrying a little already, but she doesn’t stop him.

He picks his way through the detritus in the living room. The party guests who haven’t wandered off somewhere else by now are mostly sleeping, draped across furniture, the floor, each other, naked or clothed or in between. Marcello and his girlfriend (she’d told him her name, he knows she had, but he can’t remember it) are sprawled nude and snoring on the couch. In the kitchen, a guy in his underwear and a girl wearing nothing but a feather boa are sharing a bowl together by the open window. He doesn’t know either of their names. The guy waves at him as he slips quietly out the front door.

The piazza is lit up like an inferno with the last light of sunset, the low November sun setting the pale stone ablaze. In the shadows between the apartment buildings across the square, a figure waits for him, a figure that would be hidden except for the glow of his cigarette tip, marking him like a beacon.

He’s not even surprised. He crosses the square, as if he knew he’d be waiting there for him, as if he’s still running on the implacable logic of dreams.

He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to. He walks straight up to Primo, who ditches his cigarette in a shower of sparks, drags him into the shadows of a doorway and kisses him with the desperation of a drowning man gasping for air. He wraps his arms tight around Primo’s waist, feeling the warmth and the weight of him (and the gun tucked at the small of his back), and he lets Primo lay claim to his mouth and grab handfuls of his hair and dig his fingers into the tender spot where his ass meets his thigh, and the only word he can find to describe what he’s feeling is _relief_.

“Take me somewhere,” he breathes when they pull apart for a second. “Please?”

Primo looks him up and down, like he’s assessing something. Then he nods his head toward the car. 

It’s strange, getting in the front passenger seat. Primo’s driving is no less terrifying from this vantage point.

He doesn’t know quite what he expects. A hotel, maybe. A nice one, where they’re discreet about these things, or a cheap one, where they don’t care. He doesn’t expect to be driven on a circuitous route through the growing dark, to a grubby working-class neighborhood he doesn’t know the name of, in a part of the city he never goes to. He follows Primo up the stairs to an apartment so nondescript he already knows he’d never find it again. It’s dark and narrow inside, barely furnished and reeking of cigarette smoke. But there’s a bed, and a greasy little jar of what he hopes is lube on the bedside table, both of which are improvements over last time.

They stumble back against the wall by the bed, Primo’s tongue in his mouth and his breath hot against his face, groping him brazenly through his jeans. “ _Fuck, you’re already hard for me,_ ” he breathes against his mouth, and Paul can understand him easily this time, without the slight delay to puzzle the sounds into words. It’s probably because they’re not in a loud club and he’s not high out of his mind, but it feels like magic. This is the third time he’s found his way back to Primo, and things come in threes in fairy tales, right? Maybe he’s crossed some invisible border, and he can never go back to his own world now.

Primo’s long fingers find the bulge of his cock through his jeans and stroke, demanding attention. There’s a way Primo has of touching him, like it’s his right to put his hands wherever he wants, and it’s really fucking hot. “ _Take your clothes off and I’ll fuck you like you deserve,_ ” Primo says, and he’s not sure if that’s supposed to be reassurance or an insult but he’s scrambling to obey.

Primo puts him on his back, one hand in his hair while he presses a slick finger inside him, then another in quick succession. When he winces a little Primo just mutters, “ _Oh, you can take it,_ ” and keeps going, and he turns out to be right; after the initial stretch it’s intense but not painful, and when Primo curls his fingers inside him the sudden jolt of pleasure makes him arch up off the bed with a sharp _ohh_. Primo grins, and he does it again, and again, getting a shocked little moan out of him each time. It’s disconcertingly intimate like this, Primo propped up on his elbow between his spread legs, hair fallen across his face, watching him with knife-sharp intensity while he fucks him into a breathless mess with just his fingers. He seems to enjoy it. Maybe it’s some sort of power trip, watching him squirm and swear and bite his own lips red while he wrings whatever pleasure he feels like giving him out of his body. His cock is red and hard against his belly, completely untouched, and he wants to be fucked; he’s starting to think Primo wants him to beg for it, which he’s not above doing, and maybe the words are halfway to his lips when Primo slides his fingers out and pushes his cock in without so much as a breath in between.

He’s better prepared than last time, but it’s still a lot, and unlike last time he is mostly-almost-sober, and he can feel every inch of it. “ _Relax, relax,_ ” Primo pants, hooking a hand under his knee and hitching his legs up a little higher around his torso. He takes a couple of deep breaths, and he tries his best, and he’s not going to think about the rush of heat that goes through him at Primo’s soft _bravo_ in response. Primo is moving, barely-there twitches of his hips that still jolt something deep inside him, the muscles of his stomach clenching like he wants to go a lot harder but is holding himself back.

“You can—you can _hnuuhhh_ —” is all Paul gets out, and then Primo is fucking him, hard, deep strokes that drag wrecked noises out of him; at some point he is chanting _fuck fuck fuck_ with every thrust, Primo keeping a vicious grip on his hair the whole time while he breathes a steady stream of filth into his ear, insults or praise, or both, he can’t really tell. “ _Fuck, you look good like this, God, you feel good inside, you take me so well, you’re better than any whore I ever had, look at you, look at you, you were made for this, weren’t you? You were made to be fucked._ ” And, when Paul can’t take it any more and shoves a hand between their sweaty bodies to pull at himself, shocked into coming with just a few strokes, a single whispered: “ _Beautiful._ ”

Afterward, they are both breathing hard, Primo’s hair a mess over his face. Paul is filthy, Primo’s come between his legs and his own in streaks up to his chest, but he doesn’t want to stop touching, clinging to Primo’s neck to keep kissing him. Primo indulges him longer than he would have expected, sucking on his tongue and running his hands through his hair with what could almost be described as gentleness.

He falls asleep after that, which surprises him. He wakes up some time later—maybe an hour, maybe half the night—to find Primo sitting up against the headboard, still naked and smoking a cigarette. In the soft light of the bedside lamp he looks sculpted in marble: his broad shoulders and smooth chest, the sharp lines of his profile, his solid thighs and the tendons in his forearms. His gun sits on the bedside table, next to his pack of smokes and a baggie of coke, lest Paul forget who he just drifted off next to.

 _I should be afraid of you,_ Paul thinks. _Why aren’t I afraid of you?_ Maybe his survival instincts are just permanently broken.

Primo looks down at him, his gaze dark and satisfied, or maybe just high. He reaches down and smoothes back the curls sleep has stuck to the side of Paul’s face. There’s no ear to tuck them behind, on this side. Primo’s fingers linger by his temple, and when Paul doesn’t do anything but stare up at him, he traces his thumb over the half-circle of scar tissue there, the consequence of the only act of violence during the kidnapping that Primo hadn’t had a hand in.

He shivers. No one ever touches him there. Not like this, with something that could be mistaken for affection.

“You know it was me, right?” He had assumed Francesco’s father had told Primo the truth at some point, but maybe he hadn’t. “It was my idea. The ear thing.”

“I know,” Primo says in English, then mutters something Paul thinks translates to _Crazy motherfucker,_ but he’s got a hint of a crooked smile when he says it.

“Francesco,” he says. “Is he, y’know…is he doing okay?” He supposes asking after your kidnappers’ children is no weirder than anything else he’s doing. He still wakes up with memories of Francesco’s stricken face, white as the suit he’d been wearing, blood on his hands and blood on the knife, the feeling of blood running hot down his own neck and chest.

“ _He’s tall now,_ ” Primo says, indicating a height equal to his shoulder. “ _Growing up._ ” Paul doesn’t know if he misunderstood the question, or has just decided not to answer it. Maybe it seems like a stupid question to someone with a life like Primo’s.

“How old is he now?”

“ _He’s fourteen._ ”

“Fourteen.”

He tries to remember what he’d been doing at fourteen. (Four years ago? Christ. It feels like a century.) Drugs, for sure. He remembers getting a blowjob from some actress at one of his father’s parties, the delirious thrill of realizing what was happening, her wine-painted lips around his cock. She’d smoked hash with him and not asked how old he was.

(He remembers the feeling of Talitha’s breastbone under his hands as he tried to do something he’d only seen on TV; the horrid dead stillness of her, the realization that her skin was already colder than a living person should be; screaming at his dad to _do something_ while he sobbed in the corner. He tries not to think about that one.)

He wonders what Primo was doing at fourteen. It seems strange to think of him ever having had a childhood, but it must have happened.

“Is he gonna grow up to be like you?” he asks.

“ _Not like me,_ ” Primo says, and then he adds, “ _He has a little girlfriend now._ ” Even though Paul is pretty sure Primo knows that’s not what he meant.

Primo reaches for the coke, evidently bored with conversation. He swipes a finger through the powder, and then he puts his finger in Paul’s mouth, rubbing it on his gums and ignoring his grimace at the bitterness. And then Primo still has his finger in his mouth, so he sucks on it, looking straight at him. He thinks he’s starting to understand how this game works, this Russian roulette of letting Primo get his hands close to his face.

Maybe that’s what Primo likes about him. That he’s foolish or reckless or suicidal enough not to flinch away when he reaches out.

Primo pushes him onto his back then, and does a line of coke off the sensitive skin by the ridge of his hip, licking up the residue after, the way he sucks on his finger, determined not to waste a single grain. From there it’s a short journey for his hot mouth to suck at the base of Paul’s cock, lick up the length of him and take him in his mouth.

He’s good at this too, and Paul lets himself think about nothing while Primo takes his time sucking him hard. His hair keeps falling in his face, and Paul desperately wants to put his hands in it, but he’s not sure if Primo would allow that, so he just claws at the sheets. He thinks maybe Primo is going to make him come like that, but at the last moment he stops, flips him abruptly onto his stomach and fucks him that way, Paul grinding desperately against the pillow Primo shoved under his hips.

It’s easier the second time, with Primo’s own come slicking him along, with some muscle memory of how to relax into it, and with Primo wrapping an arm around his shoulders and pulling him up onto his elbows, arching his back into an angle that sends a hot shudder of pleasure up his spine with every thrust.

“ _I should have fucked you in Calabria,_ ” Primo hisses in his ear, worming a hand under Paul’s hips to wrap around his cock. “ _You would have taken it and begged for more._ ” And maybe he would have.

Afterward, Primo falls asleep, on his side with one hand resting possessively on Paul’s stomach, which is even more surprising. Paul doesn’t dare move, staring up at the cracked plaster ceiling of Primo’s…safe house? Crash pad? He can’t really think of this place as _Primo’s apartment;_ there is nothing personal here, his clothes spilling out of a duffel bag at the foot of the bed, as if he’d roared into town in the Alfetta specifically to fuck Paul senseless tonight. He can’t say that possibility doesn’t fill him with a secret thrill.

What is he doing here? He should go home. To his wife, who is surely worrying about him by now. He should find the bathroom that must exist somewhere in this apartment, scrub off the come that’s starting to dry in unfortunate places and the scent of Primo’s sweat against his back, his cigarette-singed breath panting into his hair. He should slip out now while Primo is sleeping, find his way back to a main road and a cab home and his safe life where no one sleeps with a gun on their bedside table. He shouldn’t have done this at all, let himself be pulled into Primo’s gravity yet again. He shouldn’t have done it the first time, or the second time either. Once could be an accident, maybe. Twice could still be a coincidence. But three times? That takes intention. He’s stumbled his way into most of the things that have happened to him in life, but even he can admit that. He just has no idea what to do with it.

Next to him, Primo snores once, abruptly, mustache twitching as he frowns in his sleep. His fingers dig into Paul’s skin briefly, then relax again. He somehow manages to look restless even in sleep. He also looks _tired,_ the dark circles under his eyes bluish-purple in the dim lamplight. There is something fascinating about watching him sleep, like a wolf who’s decided to curl up next to him like a puppy. It makes him want to hold his breath and stay very still. So he does. He lies on his back in the dim apartment, staring up at the crumbling plaster of the ceiling, listening to Primo’s soft, even breathing next to him, and he doesn’t move.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [Tumblr!](http://fuckyeahisawthat.tumblr.com/)


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